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raspberry muffin at the organic bakery next door, I carried both into Margins and headed straight for the vacant couch. The entire store was vacant, but I didn’t mind. No one was around to disturb me as I ate my snack and perused the latest copy of Us Weekly , which I’d snagged from the magazine rack at the front of the store on my way through.
    I could feel my muscles loosening as I breathed in the scent of new and used books—each had a distinct smell—mingled with the fragrant steam rising from my coffee cup. With a relieved sigh, I dug my raspberry muffin out of its paper bag and tore off a large chunk.
    “No food or beverages allowed.”
    I gasped, almost choking on a mouthful of muffin, and looked in the direction of the voice. A few feet to my left, in the True Crime section, stood a man who seemed to have materialized out of the dusty air. He was sifting through books, not even looking at me, so I wasn’t completely sure if he was the one who’d spoken. But no one else was in the store, so it was either him or a bibliophile ghost.
    “Excuse me?” I said, trying to subtly dislodge a raspberry from my esophagus.
    The man paused in his book-organizing and glanced at me, then at the muffin in my hand. “No food or beverages,” he repeated. He gestured with his chin toward the front of the store. “There’s a sign on the door.”
    There was? I’d never noticed a sign. I coughed and took a sip of coffee, which was, of course, a beverage, and therefore banned. But damn it, I’d paid a small fortune for this organic snack and I wasn’t going to throw it in the trash just so I could keep sitting here. “But Kenny always lets me eat and drink in here,” I said, thinking I’d gain some cred for being on a first name basis with the owner.
    “Well,” the man said, gazing at me steadily now. “I’m not Kenny.”
    That’s for sure, I thought. Kenny was about fifty, with graying hair and wrinkles and a big, bulbous nose. But this guy…this guy was tall and lean with close-cropped dirty-blond hair and a shadow of light brown stubble on his jaws. Not Kenny-like in the slightest.
    “And unlike Kenny,” the guy went on as he slid a book off the shelf, turned it around, and returned it to the same spot, “I’m not a sucker for a pretty face. So…no food or drinks in here. Please.”
    I gaped at him. He was actually going to make me either ditch my food or leave? Seriously? All I wanted was an hour or so of solitude before I had to go home and deal with food prep and tantrums and bedtimes and questions. One measly hour, when no one wanted anything from me and I didn’t have to move. Was that so much to ask?
    “It’s not like I’m hurting anything,” I said, not ready to give in. I’d never been the strict rule-following type. Rules were made to be bent, in my opinion. Or overlooked entirely.
    The guy moved on to the next shelf, the one closest to me, pointedly looking at the scuffed wood floor beneath my feet as he went. I followed his gaze and noticed the sprinkle of muffin crumbs, some of which were buried in the gaps between the boards. Oh.
    “Look, I’ll clean it up,” I assured him. Using the sole of my sneaker, I tried pushing the crumbs into an orderly pile, but only succeeded in squishing them deeper into the gaps. The guy narrowed his eyes at me, unimpressed.
    “No, I’ll clean it up,” he said, turning back to his task. “May as well add ‘janitor’ to my mounting list of duties.”
    I felt a pinprick of remorse but pushed it back, focusing instead on this guy’s irritating presence. He examined the spines of the books on the top shelf, then rearranged two paperbacks. What was he doing, alphabetizing them? I’d already worked out that he was an employee here and not just some anal-retentive customer, but it seemed to me like he was prolonging this chore just so he could keep an eye on me. I had a passing urge to shove the rest of the muffin into my mouth, follow it with a few gulps